The first novel I publish will not be the first novel I wrote. This is not the way I planned it but life, for all the stranger-than-fiction moments it encompasses, does not necessarily follow the narrative arc of a novel. There are things we don’t get to choose. . . "
Many years ago I wrote a novel that had, at its heart, a girl’s love for her uncle and her coming of age in the wake of the emerging AIDS crisis. The novel was set in the early eighties, so little still known about AIDS except that it was running rampant in the gay population and so much of the world was running scared at just the thought of being in the same room with someone who had HIV or AIDS. What a ripe idea for a story (at least I thought so). . .